Anna Quayle was a stage comic who turned up in films for a scene or two and made each one hers: tall, saucer-eyed, certain of everything, and funniest when the script gave her one idea and let her leave before anyone repeated it.
Fi1m perspective
Midway through A Hard Day's Night (1964), a tall woman backstage recognises John Lennon and then, over one short conversation, argues him out of being himself. Anna Quayle plays Millie as someone quite sure of what she has seen and quite happy to end up on the other side of the argument, and she walks off satisfied with the whole exchange. It is her first film and one scene of it, and it is the best thing she did on screen. We laughed the first time and we laugh every time, because she plays it as if she has won.
She came from the stage, and the stage explains her. Revues first, then Anthony Newley's Stop the World – I Want to Get Off (1961), in which she played four parts in the West End and on Broadway. The films of the sixties took the same actress and gave her one part at a time: Millie, then Frau Hoffner in the Bond spoof Casino Royale (1967), then Baroness Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), both for Ken Hughes. She described herself, without complaint, as "blind as a bat, 6ft tall, with bright red hair and a crooked nose. Who needs a gimmick after that?" She was right. She never had to do much to be noticed, so what she did was pick the moment and be exact about it.
The Baroness is the part she is remembered for, and it shows both what she could do and what films did to her. She and Gert Fröbe play a couple who want each other dead and sing a duet about it, and the first time it is funny. Then Vulgaria goes on, John Shirley's editing stops cutting, and the same routine comes round again in the same silk. The fault is the film's, not hers: a revue turn is built to be done once and leave, and Hughes keeps her on. We were bored in that palace, but it was the repetition that bored us, not the woman in the frame.
Her later work was mostly television, including 85 episodes as Mrs Monroe in Grange Hill (1990–94), with the occasional film such as The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976). None of it changed what she was: a comic who arrived knowing the joke, did it, and went. The one reservation anyone has made is that the cinema never gave her more than a scene or a supporting turn when the theatre had given her four parts a night.
If you want her at her best, A Hard Day's Night, and watch for Millie. If you want her at length, the first half of Chitty, and then dinner.
Biography
Anna Quayle (born Anne Veronica Maria Quayle) was an English actor. Born in Birmingham on 6 October 1932, she died on 16 August 2019. She trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1956, and began her career in revues before appearing on stage and screen.
She won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical in 1963 for her Broadway performance in Stop the World – I Want to Get Off. Her film roles include Millie in A Hard Day's Night (1964), Frau Hoffner in Casino Royale (1967) and Baroness Bomburst in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968). On television she appeared in The Avengers and played Mrs Monroe in Grange Hill from 1990 to 1994.
